Egnyte Supercharges Google for Work

Egnyte co-founder and CEO Vineet Jain was somewhat kidding when he said that. But he was half serious, too.

He and his team have been busy building out an Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS)-like offering that they’re labeling as “Adaptive Enterprise File Services."

No matter what you call it, it’s about providing businesses users with a secure, policy driven way to work and share content from anywhere, any time, on any device, regardless of where it is stored, whether in the cloud or on-premises.

“It’s intelligent file sharing,” said Jain.

The Next Step

Unlike better-known cloud-only file-sharing services like Box and Dropbox for Business, Jain doesn't thinks many enterprises are ready to lob all of their content to the cloud just yet.

Some may move less sensitive content there first. Others may never store all of their files in the heavens for legal and compliance reasons. Maybe they want to safeguard Intellectual Property (IP) or maybe they need the speed that on-premises storage provides.

That being said, Jain acknowledged that many users enjoy Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-like experiences. So being able to leverage an interface like Google Drive for Work is important as well.

This is precisely why the team at Egnyte spent 18 months building an Egnyte for Google Apps solution in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Egnyte provides Google Apps for Work customers with an open architecture to seamlessly move files between Google Drive and on-premises infrastructure, with the same folder structure and controls, bringing together the best of Google Drive and Egnyte.

So now end users can see all of their files through a single pane of glass, whether they're stored in Google Drive or on-premises.

“There is no other solution like this,” said Jain.

What It Does

And for Google for Work customers who can’t go “all cloud,” this is huge. The solution provides enhanced flexibly and control for teams to access and collaborate on highly confidential files stored in the company’s corporate data center and from users’ private Google Drive folders, with Google and non-Google users inside and outside of the company.

The solution extends the value of Google Apps’ real time collaboration by combining it with the granular permissions and management from Egnyte.

Through the Google Apps Marketplace, admins can easily set up the integration and then manage permissions (from the Google Admin console or Egnyte) around users, groups, storage and collaboration.

Line-of-business (LOB) users can still work from the same Google environment they’re used to with the enhanced features for centralized file access and secure sharing with teams inside and outside of the company. Both IT and business users can also easily move files between the Google Drive cloud and on-premises infrastructure based on different requirements (i.e., sensitivity, file size, bandwidth constraints, optimized performance).

At the end of the day, Google for Work customers have something they didn’t have yesterday, an ability to work with on-premises files as if they were in the cloud.